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Less than two weeks after a surprise rebel offensive began to retake areas of Syria for the first time in nearly a decade, the Assad regime fell on December 8. Once seen as entrenched and immovable, the government’s collapse came 53 years since Assad family rule began in Syria and nearly 14 years after the start of an uprising that called for its overthrow.
Rebel groups Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army led the offensives that began on November 25. Turkey, which had been in the process of normalizing relations with Assad, seems to have backed the offensive as a— its forces pulled back when they reached Aleppo, suggesting that recapturing entire cities was more than it expected to accomplish.
Similarly, Israel has for years expressed its preference for the maintenance of the Assad regime, which has done little to oppose Israel’s expansionary tactics and violations. In 2018, Netanyahu said that “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights,” noting that his worry was with Iranian influence over Syria, not the Syrian regime itself.
But Syrians have also resisted Nusra, and are likely to continue to resist HTS as well. In 2016, residents of Ma’arat al-Nu’man, a city in rural Idlib between Aleppo and Hama controlled at the time by Nusra,against Nusra and its allied Islamist groups and their reactionary crimes. After four months, the popular protest campaign in Ma’arat al-Nu’man won the release of protestors who had been arrested by Nusra.
In the days since Bashar al-Assad fled and the remaining members of the regime handed state institutions over to the rebels, HTS along with political opposition leaders in exile have put together a plan for an 18-monthlong transitional government, featuring HTS’s Mohammed al-Bashir, who headed the group’s governance in Idlib, as transitional prime minister.
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